Stuckey wasn't as aggressive as I would have liked last night but unselfish and got his teammates involved. Should have had 16 assists if anyone could hit a 3 ball. Kid plays hard every night and a lot of minutes. That dunk on Thabeet was nasty, while his rebounding and defense were very solid.

Prince wasn't ever as good a player as everyone made him out to be. You could see he maxed his potential in his 3rd season. He stinks. He should be getting 20 mins a game max.

Rip was shooting lights out the first half but he's lost a step. O.J. Mayo is no Jordan and he was making Rip look like Michael Redd on defense.

I've always liked Maxiel, ever since he was drafted. The guy plays larger than 6'9" ( Like he's really 6'9") always hustles and I think his offense is underrated. I'd honestly like to see more of him on the floor than CV. No surprise last night he almost singlehandedly got us back in the game.

BBen is usually lights out on boards, offense or defense but you could really see his lack of height hurting him last night on the glass and one on one against Gasol. Unless there was weak side help he was pretty much getting scored on left and right.

JJ as usual was a spark off the bench but he's to hesitant to take the ball and score. There were a couple of times he had an open 3 but didn't take the shot, passing instead. Multiple times he had a lane and was hesitant to pick the ball up and dribble. I really like this kid but he needs to be more aggressive on the offensive end.

CV wasn't really much of a factor. Odd baseline shots and he hung around the 3-point line too much for me.

This was a game where Memphis came in as the most penalized team in the NBA and we failed to do any work down low.

Last thing we needed was Tay coming back and mucking up the chemistry. Complete with missing the last Piston shot of the game. Just when they looked like they were starting to click a few games ago.

I know he needs time to get up to speed but I feel as though we would have won 2 out of the last 3 if he stayed out. How come other teams don't go through this when one of their main guys returns from injury.

I think we should be careful to rush to judgement about Maxiell. If he's all that good, why don't we see it from him every game? He had an unusually good game, and that's great. If he can continue to do well, all the better. But one good game out of 20 doesn't necessarily warrant him getting more minutes.

Mlive.com posted an article from one of its reporters/bloggers talking about how Maxiell is a much better player, statisticaly, when he plays fewer minutes.

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Here are charts for Max's numbers and how they increase/decrease relative to minutes played. This is only from this year's games. I added a 6-order polynomial trendline to better identify possible trends in the data.

It looks to me like points and rebounds increase pretty linearly with minutes. Blocks and turnovers stay about the same. Fouls plateau at about the 12-28 minute range.

I don't see any correlation whatsoever in the points vs. minutes chart. It looks completely random.

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Here's the same chart with a linear trendline. Clearly the points are increasing with minutes played. I admit a lot of the samples are all over the place (a big cloud of points instead of a small tight envelope), but as a whole they trend upward.

I think we've all watched Max long enough to know that he's good for 15mpg, every once in a while he'll have a MAX(imum) moment and you can get 25mins out of him and that usually happens once or twice every 10 games. I'd have no problem with it if he made Chris Wilcox type money, he's overpaid by about 2, 2 & a half million bucks.